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12 Questions with Ryan Blaney

Our series of NASCAR driver interviews continues this week with Ryan Blaney, who is currently second in the Camping World Truck Series point standings for Brad Keselowski Racing. Blaney will drive a partial

Our series of NASCAR driver interviews continues this week with Ryan Blaney, who is currently second in the Camping World Truck Series point standings for Brad Keselowski Racing. Blaney will drive a partial Sprint Cup Series schedule for Wood Brothers Racing next season.

Q: When you're on a long green-flag run and not racing around anyone, what do you think about?

A: I try to keep it focused on trying different things, but it's hard to say, really. Sometimes your mind just kind of wanders. Sometimes you draw a blank and you almost get bored a little bit there for a second – especially like if you're leading and your car is really good.

If your car is bad, then you're focused a little more on trying to do different things like move up the racetrack. It's what you can do to get your car better. But when you're leading, you're just kind of blank, in the zone and focused.

Q: Fans sometimes come up to you and want to discuss a moment or race from your career. Which one comes up the most?

A: A lot of people say they've been watching my dad (Dave Blaney) for a long time. They'll say, "I knew you when you were 5," but I don't remember them or anything like that. I get a lot of people saying they were a big fan of my dad and they have old stories about him, and I think that's cool.

Some people will come up to me and say they watched me run Late Models or say, "I watched you run at Dillon, South Carolina." I'll remember some of them sometimes. There's a handful that follow that PASS tour around – like I'd go to every race and see them every single weekend. So it's cool to see them out here. Those are like the true ones, I think.

Q: If someone paid you $5 million to design a new racetrack and gave you an unlimited budget, what kind of track would you build?

A: All the other drivers have said something different, but I always think it'd be cool to design a road course – but instead of all flat corners, you could have like 20 degrees of banking in one corner, you could have a 15-degree U-turn, then have another part with all flat esses. I thought that'd be really cool – banking, elevation changes and some flat corners. It would have a lot of character.

So you'd be racing around this road course and come up to a corner and it'd have huge banking?

It'd be like Texas banking – you can just run around there. (Grins) I think that'd throw a pretty neat factor into it.

Q: If you had a day off to do anything in the world you wanted — but you were not allowed to race — what would you do?

A: I want to go to space. That's something I really want to do. I want to witness zero gravity and go to the Space Station. I guess you said anything in the world though.

Well, it's still in the world's orbit. I think that counts.

Yeah. So I'd do that. That'd be really cool to do.

Maybe you can save up for that someday if you're a Cup driver and buy the $20 million space tourism flight.

I don't know if I'd pay $20 million to go to space though. (Laughs) I'd just rather train and become an astronaut or something. Go there for free!

Q: You get to have a lot of cool experiences away from racing through your job as a NASCAR driver. What's one that sticks out?

A: Something cool I'll do with Brad (Keselowski) and his Checkered Flag Foundation is we give (full-speed) ridealongs to veterans. We have a Cup car and a Nationwide car. Sometimes they're wounded, but it's pretty neat. We'll all show up about an hour ahead of time and they'll kind of tell us their stories and names, and it's pretty cool to hear what they've done and what they've been through and what they're doing now.

A guy can lose both legs and he's walking around like nothing happened. It's pretty amazing the road to recovery those guys go through. To be out there and see the excitement they get from being able to ride along in the cars – I did ones at Bristol and Michigan – and that's probably one of the coolest experiences I've done.

Q: When you go home after a bad day at the track, do you vent to someone about it or just keep it to yourself?

A: Sometimes I vent to myself about it, like on the ride home or something – whether you're just thinking about it or talking out loud. When I lived with my parents, I'd vent to them all the time. Sometimes I call my mom and vent about it now. I don't have a wife or girlfriend I can vent to, so really it's either to myself or my mom if she calls me. Your parents are people you can be yourself around and open up to and discuss your frustrations with. But mostly myself.

When you say you vent to yourself, are you talking out loud like, "Stupid Ryan. Why'd you do that?"

Not that much. It's really just in my head, you know? I don't remember entire races – I probably remember 20% of races and big things that happen. Like if you make a mistake or you made a good move, I'll remember those.

I mostly remember the mistakes, because those are the most traumatic. They're kind of burned in your brain. It's a shame because you don't want to remember them, but they're always there and you have a split second of reliving it. It's like, "Why'd I do that?" or "If I'd done this there, that wouldn't have happened."

A perfect example is Talladega in the Nationwide race where I caused a big wreck. We were leading and Elliott Sadler got inside of me. I was looking in my mirror to try and get in a hole, and I was trying to side-draft him at the same time, and I clipped him and hit the fence and caused the big wreck. I relived that one for like two weeks, like, "What could I have done different?" It's unfortunate you relive the bad ones because I want to relive the good ones sometimes.

Q: If you have kids someday and they're running around the garage, what driver would you point to as a good example for how to conduct themselves?

A: Well just based on Cup drivers now, I'd probably say Jimmie Johnson. He's a great guy. Carl Edwards has been a great guy to me, too. And Brad can be very influential to children too, I think. He's a philosopher, I guess you could say. (Laughs)

But kids my age? If we all make it and have kids someday, I grew up with Chase Elliott and raced with him, and he comes from a great family. He's a great guy and you can see a little bit of Jimmie Johnson in him.

Q: When you stand around with other drivers and tell old racing stories, what's one of your favorites to tell either about something that happened to yourself or someone else?

A: If me and Darrell (Wallace Jr.) are talking, we'll just end up talking about ones that happened last week. There's not really a story we go back to. Like if we were racing each other, we'll kind of relive that moment – I did this here and he did that there, or that guy made some great move. We'll just talk about details from the last race.

Q: What's a TV show you're really into right now?

A: I'm a big fan of the South Park series, Family Guy, American Dad. If you mean an actual TV show with real people, I'm really into The Walking Dead right now. I've followed that since the first season and I'm really into it now, obviously, since it's a new season. I was a big Dexter fan, too. I liked that a lot.

Q: What's the last movie you saw – either at home or in the theater -- and was it any good?

A: The last movie I saw in the theater was Annabelle. It wasn't very good. I was disappointed in it. It's a horror movie about a doll. I mean, I can make a horror movie about a doll. I just don't find that very scary. (Laughs)

The one I saw before that though that was really good was The Equalizer with Denzel Washington. That was really, really good. And one I really want to see is that Nightcrawler movie. That looks good. I'm into those kind of movies.

Q: If you could give a piece of advice to your younger self — something you know now that you didn't know when you first started — what would it be?

A: It's hard to stay motivated in this sport. Sometimes you can have a bad week or two and it gets you down and you kind of lose motivation. You've always got to stay motivated and it's that whole don't-give-up speech. You've got to keep fighting and trying new things to get yourself better, whether it's driving or doing things with the car.

When I made my first start in the Nationwide Series in 2012 with Tommy Baldwin at Richmond, we qualified eighth and finished seventh. I look back at that now and I always want to take that race back, because if I would have known then what I know now about those cars, I think we had a good shot of winning that race. That's how bad I want to go back and redo that.

You know, these Trucks or Nationwide cars or Cup cars are just so different than anything you could do growing up like Super Late Models, Late Model stocks, Legend cars. K&N cars are a little bit (similar), but the tire is completely different. So it's hard to kind of transfer it over.

It's really just that you think you can drive these cars a lot harder than you can. That's something I used to do – I used to overdrive a lot. You have to drive with a lot of finesse. That's just seat time, experience and you eventually kind of catch on to what they like.

The biggest thing to me that was different were the changes in practice to try and get us better. Things wouldn't work on a Nationwide car that would work on a K&N car or Late Model car in practice to try and get it better. It just doesn't do it, with the weight, tire, engine – it just doesn't like it sometimes. And that's something I really got to know as I started to learn these cars more and more.

Q: I've been asking each person to give me a question for the next interview. Last week was Cole Whitt, and he wanted to know what you did in your bus – because he doesn't have one.

A: All I do on my bus is eat and watch TV. That's all I do. There's not much else to do. I need to get an Xbox in there or something for when I'm bored. But not a lot goes on. I try to not be in my bus as much as possible. I try to drive to go get some food or go eat with my team or something like that.

Q: And do you have a question for the next person? It's Landon Cassill.

A: I really want to ask him about the Cup race at Talladega and why we almost wrecked. (Laughs) Ask him: "Why did you come across four lanes of traffic to block me when you were leading?" Because that almost made me wreck Junior, and that would have been terrible! (Laughs) It was really close. So ask him and see what he says about that.